Today’s article is
from “The Washington Post” & talks about water shortages in India:
Indian states fight
over river usage
Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty
Images - Indian residents in a district facing a drinking water shortage wait
with plastic pots at a community tube well to collect drinking water in
Bangalore on October 8, 2012.
By Shyamantha Asokan,
Apr 02, 2013 04:58 PM EDT
The Washington Post
MAGIZHI, India — MAGIZHI,
India —Valan, a rice farmer in a starched white shirt and sarong, walked along
the bone-dry canal bed next to his village in the state of Tamil Nadu as though
it were a road. The canal should have been full from last June until the end of
the year, he said, but it stood dry, except for one month in which unexpected
storms flooded the canal and destroyed his crops.
In the past, “we could just
use the rainwater,” said Valan, who like many Tamils has only one name. “But
the rains are becoming more unpredictable, so certainly the river is becoming
more important.”
Valan was referring to the
Cauvery, a 475-mile river that supports farmers in three southern Indian
states. After the poor monsoon last year, the river became the subject of a
bitter legal battle that drew in the nation’s Supreme Court and ended only in
February with a federally mandated water-sharing deal between Karnataka, the
state in which the Cauvery begins, and Tamil Nadu, its downstream neighbor.
As India’s economic growth
drives a rising thirst for water, and with its annual rainy season projected to
become increasingly erratic in coming years because of climate change, many
states across the country are fighting over their shared rivers. In the west, a
tribunal has been working since the fall to find a solution to three states’
claims on the Mahadayi, or Mandovi, River. Another tribunal is trying to solve
two eastern states’ dispute over the Vansadhara.
There are similar tensions
on an international level. Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, last
week asked China for more openness about its plans to build dams on the
Brahmaputra, a vast Himalayan river that flows into India from the Tibetan
region of western China.
India’s river disputes “have
become more severe, and they will continue to become more severe,” said Ashok
Jaitly, who sits on a national government committee that is drafting a law on
water management. “Water use is increasing, but the supply is fixed.”
With India ruled by a fractious
coalition government, state-level spats can destabilize national politics. The
dynastic Congress party, which leads the coalition, controls fewer than half of
the country’s 28 states and relies on alliances with regional parties, which
often put local and populist causes first. The river disputes are one such
example, said Tushaar Shah, a senior fellow at the International Water
Management Institute, a research group headquartered in Sri Lanka. “I do think
[the disputes] are getting worse. It’s become a political issue, and state
politicians are always playing to the galleries.”
One regional party from Tamil
Nadu recently left the Congress-led coalition after the federal government
refused to alter foreign policy to fit its demands.
India will need 1.5 trillion
cubic meters (396 trillion gallons) of water per year by 2030, about double its
existing supply and more than a fifth of the projected global demand, according
to a 2010 report from the International Finance Corp. and the
consulting firm McKinsey & Co. Yet as the population swells, India’s water
supply per person is dropping. The country has an annual average of 1,545 cubic
meters (408,145 gallons) of water available per person, according to India’s
2011 census — qualifying it as a “water-stressed” nation under World Bank
criteria.
That growing
thirst is driven by agriculture, with about 90 percent of the country’s water used in
farming. India, home to 1.2 billion people and set to overtake China as the
world’s most populous country by 2025, has a surging demand for food. Rice, a
national staple, requires up to 1 million gallons of water per acre — double
the amount needed for wheat.
Rising incomes
also mean that more people can afford costly and water-intensive items such as
meat and dairy products. New factories and thermal power stations are further
pushing up water usage.
Wasted water
In Tamil Nadu,
rain shortfalls before and after a bout of damaging storms caused almost half
the crops in the 1.6 million-acre Cauvery delta — an area known as South
India’s rice bowl — to fail or to produce low yields during January’s harvest,
according to the delta’s farmer welfare association.
Magizhi’s
farmers are getting by on government handouts. They say they have received
about $184 per acre of failed crops. The state government is also distributing
free rice from its grain stores.
After its
complaints last year that Karnataka was diverting water from the Cauvery, Tamil
Nadu recently also asked the federal government to stop the neighboring state
from diverting water from the Ponnaiyar, another interstate
river, according to local newspaper reports.
However, even
as India’s states fight over their rivers, experts say that there is enough
water to go around but that much is being wasted. Farmers, who account for more
than half the population and constitute a vital voter bloc, receive irrigation
subsidies and use cheap water imprudently, experts say.
“The
traditional farmers think that the government has a responsibility to give them
water, and they don’t take care to use it efficiently,” said S. Ranganathan,
the general secretary of the delta’s farmer welfare association, though he
added that many farmers are adapting.
In urban areas,
rivers and lakes near booming but unplanned cities are often contaminated.
Shah, the International Water Management Institute senior fellow, said India’s
problems with water availability are “being overplayed.”
“It’s more to
do with how you manage the water than how much you have,” he said. “There are
many countries that are doing much better with less water, such as the Middle
Eastern countries.”
Some Indian
states are starting to encourage or compel efficiency, Shah said. Karnataka has
raised water prices in some cities. Gujarat, a western state, has limited
farmers’ access to electricity for irrigation pumps to eight hours a day. But
with a dozen states facing votes this year or the next, and a national election
due by May 2014, politicians are unlikely to enact more curbs that affect
farmers.
Erratic monsoons
Ranganathan
said the Cauvery dispute is far from finished. Although the spat between
Karnataka and Tamil Nadu had been rumbling at a low level for several decades,
he said, it is likely to keep flaring up in the coming years as India’s rainy
season becomes more erratic.
The annual
monsoon on which India’s farmers depend is becoming more unpredictable,
according to rainfall data for 1901-2004. A mix of dry
spells and sudden downpours, rather than the traditional uninterrupted weeks of
rain, is becoming more common.
Environmentalists
have warned for years that India is particularly at risk from such phenomena,
which they link to global warming. “The Himalayan glaciers are receding,
agricultural yields are stagnating, dry days have increased, patterns of
monsoon have become more unpredictable,” Jairam Ramesh, the minister of
environment and forests at the time, told the Mint newspaper in 2009. “So, we
are seeing the effects” of climate change.
As for this
year’s water-sharing pact, the problem “is that it does not contain a formula
for sharing water in situations of distress — when the monsoons fail,”
Ranganathan said. “But there is every chance that the idea of distress will
become a permanent part of how we share out the water.”
